Blog Post 2- Lisa Nakamura; Introduction to Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet– “Digital Racial Formations and Networked Images of the Body”

In her introduction to Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (2008), Lisa Nakamura examines the ways in which gender and race factor into the construction of digital bodies on the Internet. Nakamura begins with an examination of the year 1995 as a seminal one for Internet activity, with the first public stock offering of Netscape Navigator transforming the web from “a primarily textual form to an increasingly and irreversibly graphical one” (1). This idea of visual [culture] studies is something that Nakamura expounds upon for the majority of the introduction to Digitizing Race, paying particular attention to the manner in which visuals and imagery marginalize women and people of color within the hegemonic white, male domain of the Internet (13). Nakamura distinguishes between “visual culture” and “visual culture studies”; Visual culture focuses on “the production, technology, and reception of the visual image,” while visual culture studies focuses on “the production of identity in visual forms” (3). She explains that the Internet’s “uses and users unevenly visualize race and gender in online environments”: namely, by relegating women and people of color to a lower-class status concerning the creation, consumption, and circulation of visual cultural capital (5).

Central to Nakamura’s argument is the notion that New Media and visual culture studies have not adequately accounted for the roles of communication and networking within digital environments. Communication studies, she argues, is not prepared to analyze this sudden surge of digital images and their signification/meaning-making capabilities with regard to identity much in the same way that art historians are ill-equipped to make sense of Internet chat-rooms and bulletin boards (more on the debate about art history as it relates to visual studies in the discussion questions below) (10). According to Nakamura, “studies of digital visual culture have yet to discuss networking, social spaces, or power relations in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender, but have done a superb job at parsing the history of digitality’s address to the eye. Studies from a communications perspective have discussed the dynamics of online interaction quite exhaustively but fail to integrate their findings into readings of what the sites do visually” (10). In short, Nakamura identifies the lack of a field of study that looks at both user demographics and online digital interfaces and their relationship to (and simultaneous effects upon) one another, something she aims to achieve in the following chapters of the book.

Another important aspect of this introduction is the idea of subject/object formations the visual nature of the Internet creates and maintains among its users. In order to explain this idea, Nakamura calls upon the notion of “interactivity,” or the “act of clicking and moving one’s perspective in the context of the dynamic screen” (15). Although meant to be “empowering,” she writes that “women and people of color are both subjects and objects of interactivity; they participate in digital racial formations via acts of technological appropriation, yet are subjected to it as well” (16). Nakamura cites the limited options for minority groups to create and/or select digital avatars in order to emphasize this point, but ultimately uses the example of Jennifer Lopez’s 1999 music video “If You Had My Love” to analyze it thoroughly. The video opens by depicting Lopez through the medium of the computer screen as a white, male viewer watches. Nakamura thus notes how Lopez “presents herself in the video as an object of interactivity, despite her position as the star and the knowing object of the interactive gaze” (19). As the video progresses, Lopez is also viewed under the gazes of black, white, and Latina men, women, and young girls, reinforcing what Nakamura terms the “multimedia” of the star, using the digital interface to “exploit a digital culture that purveys an ideal and mutable female body of color” which “shifts in order to meet audience preferences” (27). In this way, Lopez’s video represents a surrendering of the agency of the digital female body through the framing of voyeurism and the privileged position of audience perspective. Only when one achieves the means to “manage personal visual capital,” she argues, can s/he make the transition from digital object to digital subject (33).

Nakamura ends her introduction with an overview of the structure of the book’s remaining chapters. Chapter One examines the concept of the Internet youth culture through the medium of AIM buddies. Chapter Two examines online racial profiling through the use of the website www.alllooksame.com. Chapter Three analyzes the science fiction films Gattaca, The Matrix trilogy, and Minority Report in order to better illustrate “objects of interactivity” (31), and Chapter Four studies the concept of pregnant avatars created by expecting mothers on internet bulletin boards. In doing so, she aims to portray the Internet as “an intensely active, productive space of visual signification” (34).

Also, because I haven’t figured out how to embed video yet, here’s the link to the Jennifer Lopez video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYfkl-HXfuU

Discussion Questions:

1. Nakamura devotes considerable space in her introduction to the debate surrounding the relationship of art history to visual culture studies, writing: “The formation of digital culture studies in the United States was driven…by a group of American art historians who realized that interdiscipline was needed to account for the digital and saw the digital as driving other concerns at large with visual media of all kinds” (7). Do we agree with Nakamura’s assessment that visual culture studies can/should be viewed as an extension of art history in some way? Why or why not?
2. Nakamura uses Ron Eglash’s term “technological appropriation,” meant to signify “what happens when users with ‘low social power’ modify existing technologies such as the Internet” (13). Can we think of examples of such technological appropriation/what would constitute such modifications?
3. Taking the example of the prominence of black male avatars in video games such as the Madden franchise (despite the underrepresentation of black male game designers), can we argue that digital minority bodies achieve selective majority in carefully monitored digital environments? Does such an example represent a false sense of digital equality? Why or why not? How does this support Nakamura’s claim that race and gender must be viewed as “mutually constructive formations” within the digital realm?
4. Nakamura notes that the positions of subject and object are not mutually exclusive roles and that “it is not possible to definitively decide who is being interacted and who is being interactive except in specific instances” (35). What might such instances/situations look like?
5. Nakamura’s analysis is based on the landscape of the Internet in 2008 and the years leading up to it. Quite simply, how does this analysis compare to the way we see the Internet operating today?

Sources:

JenniferLopezVEVO. “If You Had My Love (Official Video).” Online Video Clip. YouTube. 2 Oct. 2009. Web. 1 Feb. 2016.

Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2008. Print.